Imagine you’re on stage speaking, or you’re at a networking event surrounded by loads of prospects. Or maybe you’re with a customer and you start talking them through a process that you’re supposed to be an expert in. And someone stops you, stands up points at you and says, “you don’t really know what you’re doing, do you?”
This is the fear for so many funnel builders and in this blog post, I want to talk to you about why you are already an expert. How to combat that worried feeling in the back of your mind that you’ll be found out as a fraud. What experts do to position themselves and how to fight the little voice in your head that says “you don’t deserve this”.
We’re also going to be talking about what an expert is and what they do and how you can position yourself as an expert. Even if you’ve got all of these worries.
I’ve got some free training in below on how to choose the perfect niche for your funnel business. Even if you’ve tried to find a niche before I want to show you the mind numbingly dull secret behind choosing the perfect niche. And what Ryan Deiss does to find a profitable niche.
Have you ever felt that maybe you’re supposed to call yourself an expert? Maybe you feel a bit uncomfortable calling yourself an expert?
For a lot of businesses, we want to attract higher quality customers as well as higher budgets. Also we want to attract customers rather than having to chase them.
When you’re an expert, and you’re seen as an expert in the field, people approach you for work. That’s the big benefit of being positioned as an expert. People approach you rather than you having to go and chase them. And there’s a lot of advantages to calling yourself an expert.
If you want to start speaking as well, or attending events or being paid to go to networking events and being known for something. The way you do that is by achieving expert status.
A lot of people feel that experts, are people who other someone else deemed an expert. Because of things like the news and other media content that we consume, it’ll say, “Hey, this is Michael Killen a local expert on Bigfoot”.
The media puts the title of “expert” on people, which means everyone else in the world feels that someone else has to give you the label of expert. And that’s when people then say, “You should write a book on Bigfoot, or you should speak at this event on Bigfoot”.
And if you want to be known for a topic, no one else is going to hand that label out to you. It’s a huge, huge misconception that someone else gives you the title of expert.
That literally will never ever, ever happen until you start doing it yourself. The people who do call themselves an expert, position themselves in an area that’s very difficult for other people to dispute.
There’s a misconception that expert status is awarded. And then you’re asked to write books, attend speaking conferences and give content away.
So how do you justify yourself as an expert? The first thing to understand is, to take a scale of 0 to 10 in whatever field you think you want to be an expert in.
Marketing funnels, Bigfoot, writing books, creating videos, podcasts, Facebook advertising, cart abandonment sequences, email copy, whatever you want to consider yourself an expert in. Rank yourself from 0 to 10.
And you might think “I’m only a 3 out of 10 maybe”. Even someone who’s a 3 out of 10 is still an expert to everyone who considers themselves a 2 out of 10, or 1 out of 10 and 0 out of 10. And even some people who are 3 out of 10.
That’s still an enormous part of the market. And because the market in terms of expert status and knowledge is kind of like a pyramid, with most people being at the bottom, you capture most of the market and can appear as an expert to most of the market, if you rank yourself around a 4 or 5. So even at a low to mid level, you’re still able to add massive value and help a lot of people who consider themselves lower than that.
Daniel Priestley, author of Key Person of Influence, as well as Entrepreneur Revolution, 24 Assets and Oversubscribed, he talks about sitting on a mountain of value.
Everyone is sitting on a mountain of value. All this stuff you know, all the experiences you’ve had, problems you faced, and the solutions you’ve created, have allowed you to create this mountain of value that you’re sat on top of.
And if you understand and are comfortable with all the things that you’ve done, and you list out everything that you’re capable of, you’d be surprised at just how much knowledge you’re sitting on.
People think that you achieve expert status, and then you’re asked to write the book. And it’s the other way around. People achieve expert status by doing regular content creation. They’ll publish books, they create podcasts. They have YouTube videos, they write content, they do blog posts, they appear on other people’s talks. Events are constantly looking for speakers, they reach out and find those people and are asked to speak on a particular topic.
Here’s the important point though, in order to consider yourself an expert, you have to stick to the same message in the same topic over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again until you are known for that one thing.
A lot of people will talk about a topic like Facebook ads, and they say they want to be seen as an expert in digital marketing. So they’ll talk about Facebook ads. And then because they overvalue novelty, they’ll change their topic, and then start talking about conversion rates. And then they’ll start talking about email marketing, and then they’ll start talking about automation.
And they think it’s under the broad guise of digital marketing, but they’re never positioning themselves because they never stay on message. I am now (bizarrely) seen as an expert in marketing funnels, automation, training, sales coaching, motivation, email copywriting, all of these areas.
Despite the fact that I only really talk about selling marketing funnels. That’s all I really talk about, but because I stay on message bizarrely, I’m seen as an expert in other areas.
And if we look at what experts do, they write books, they publish content, they speak to people, they stay on message over and over. That’s what gives them the expert status.
Occasionally, I do get people call me out. I remember someone once called me out and said “look, you don’t really know what you’re talking about. It’s, it’s easy for you. It’s very, very easy for you to get a lot kind of these kinds of clients”.
I replied and showed all the links and blog posts and books and videos and podcasts that I created supporting my point. It wasn’t easy for me to get clients. It was hard work. But with a lot of content and giving away lots of value, it’s now much easier. I have great clients because of what I’ve given away. I had to work to get to that stage.
Because there’s so much evidence of stuff that I’ve talked about over and over and over, staying on message, that’s what positions me as an expert,
Just because you already know something, doesn’t mean that someone else won’t find it valuable. It’s a really common misconception that we think “Yeah, but I know this. So surely everyone would know this”.
You’d be staggered at how little people know about the world that we are in. Thank you pages, conversion pixels, optimization rates, email marketing, cart abandonment sequences, there’s so much that we can help people with. Just because you know, it doesn’t mean that other people know it.
And even if they do know it, what they usually want is someone to come in and help them. Don’t think that just because you know something, that other people will also know it. Because most of the time they don’t. And don’t forget that if you even consider yourself a 3 out of 10 you’re still able to help people who are a 1 or 2 out of zero and even some 3’s.
I’ve got some free training in the description down below on how to choose the perfect niche for your funnel business. Even if you’ve tried to find a niche before I want to show you the mind numbingly dull secret behind choosing the perfect niche. And what Ryan Deiss does to find a profitable niche.
Where do you consider your expert status? Remember that you get to choose your expert status. So let me know in the comments below if you’ve got any ideas, and let me know the common traits that you see other experts do.
What do they do to achieve that status? They write books they produce content? Let me know in the comments below.
